Why are many U.S. cities building less? Why have they insisted on a "thicket" of regulations that make housing hard to build? In a new #jobmarketpaper with @beau_bressler , I study how much of the answer lies with a forgotten federal program that taught cities to restrict growth

🚀I am on the #EconJobMarket! My JMP asks a classic question: Do large, dominant firms foster or hinder innovation? To study this, I turn to the Great Merger Wave (1895–1904), when >2,600 U.S. firms combined into corporate giants like U.S. Steel and DuPont. A JMP 🧵👇 (1/13)

New pre-doc positions: @arpitrage and I are hiring for two pre-docs, one to start ASAP and one to start next Fall, to help expand our work using LLMs to measure and study zoning codes in the US. Please apply here: apply.interfolio.com/176538

🚨New predoc positions!🚨 Join @AlexBartik and me to work on developing LLM tools to analyze zoning regulations and their impacts on housing affordability. One position starting at the "normal" cycle next year, and another ASAP. Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/176538

📢Heavily revised working paper on AI Zoning —  with @AlexBartik and @DMilo75, we have a new draft of our paper which expands on our method to understand housing regulations with AI. Incudes a new public data release with more housing regulation data:

1/ Excited to share a thread about my JMP: The Impact of Institutional Investors on Homeownership and Neighborhood Access joshuacoven.github.io/assets…

New WP! @andrea_eisfeldt and I have put together an overview of Generative AI as a shock to technology in the economy at large and to the finance industry and financial research "technology" in particular, for the Annual Review of Financial Economics...

Google's NotebookLM is the current best "wow this is amazing & useful" demo of AI Here I gave it the entire text of my book, it turned it into a podcast, a study guide, FAQ, timeline & quite accurate chat Listen to the first few minutes of the "podcast." Seriously, just listen.

🚨 New publicly available dataset on housing regulations across US municipalities With @AlexBartik and @DMilo75, we highlight a novel AI-based method for accurate categorization of regulations in unstructured text, which we use to establish 5 facts about housing regulation: